About two weeks ago, I started feeling strain and pain in my right thumb.
Not throbbing pain or anything, just intermittent strain with occasional pain. Enough that I noticed it and thought, “Hmm. This could turn into something. I need to deal with it now.”
It gave me anxiety because I had repetitive strain in my hand in grad school.
Now, you might think:
“Ryan, you’re a somatics practitioner. So you probably did somatics for it.”
And normally, yes, that's what I would do.
But this time, I decided I needed to look at my hand habits and environment. No point in "fixing" my thumb if I am doing something that is going to bring back the strain.
You can probably guess what the culprit was...thumb...strain...likely to do with computer, mouse, writing, or a phone, right?
Yep.
I use a Mac with a trackpad. The little square below the keyboard where you can swipe right, swipe left, scroll, click, and do all that.
And the way I use it, I click with my right thumb.
I’ve been doing that for years, perhaps more than a decade. Clicking who knows how many hundreds of thousands of times.
Apparently, my right thumb decided it had had enough.
The pain and strain were basically my thumb saying:
“Hey. Something needs to change here.”
I got on YouTube and started looking up ergonomic trackpads and ergonomic mice. And some of them looked useful. But before buying anything, I decided to test my theory.
I went digging through my old boxes and junk drawers and found a 10-year-old white Apple mouse.
I plugged it in on the left side of my computer. And now, when I need to click on something, I use the mouse with my left hand.
My right thumb gets a break.
It is no longer clicking hundreds of times a day.
And...it seems to work. Feels better.
So far so good.
Worried that it might not be enough, I also dunked both my hands in ice water for a few days. Nothing complicated, just a bowl with ice to reduce inflammation, and get circulation moving through my thumb and fingers.
And those two little non-Feldenkrais interventions have (so far) eliminated nearly all of the strain in my hand.
I'm not giving advice here about specific treatments for pain and strain relief. I'm just saying that it can be good to pause and ask:
- What am I doing repeatedly that might be causing this?
- What can I do to change the pattern?
Sometimes the answer is finding what you have been doing over and over, and changing it up until you get a useful change.
Peace!
Ryan
